


Lay Us Down, We’re In Love

by henriettahoney



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adulthood, Alternate Universe - Parents, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Pynch Week 2019, Romantic Soulmates, Ronan Lynch Has Feelings, Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish, Soulmates, but not really, i cant stop writing Adam and Ronan as parents someone help
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 04:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20772377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henriettahoney/pseuds/henriettahoney
Summary: “It goes deeper than that,” Ronan elaborated with a shake of his head. “It’s called that, the no butterflies principle, because that’s the most surface explanation of the feeling. If you ever run into somebody you think you could be interested in and then you realize being around them makes you jittery, you’ll know that’s not it. But the sensation you get when you do meet them—” He paused, scrubbing a hand over his chin. “It’s less like meeting, and more like your entire being saying, Oh, yeah, there he is. Or, you know, her, or they, or whoever. It’s like—it’s like coming back to a home you’ve been gone from so long you forgot it existed, and then you see it again and you can’t believe you ever left.”





	Lay Us Down, We’re In Love

“How did you know?”

Ronan suppressed the smile that automatically surfaced at every glimpse of Opal’s teenage nerves, feet tapping against the wooden steps of the porch, ripped jeans exposing the scabbed skin of her knees. “I know it sounds a little ambiguous,” he said, leaning back against the post opposite her, “but when you feel it, you won’t have a doubt.”

“Did Daddy?” Opal asked now—which, Ronan surmised, was a fair enough inquiry regarding Adam, who questioned everything. 

“He says he didn’t,” Ronan told her with a shrug. “You can talk to him more about it, too. He’s better at explaining things than I am.”

Opal sighed and closed her eyes, falling dramatically back across the slats of the porch. Ronan wanted to ask her how she wasn’t burning to death in her leather jacket in the middle of the hottest summer Virginia had seen since she was born sixteen years ago, and then was hit with the stark realization that he wouldn’t have been caught dead without his at her age, temperature be damned. “I just want to be sure when I meet them,” she murmured. “What if it’s at some kind of—I don’t know, some kind of speaking event or something, and I’m already nervous?”

“Then they’ll _ make _ you calm,” Ronan assured her, leaning across the space between them to deftly untangle a knot from the end of her wild, blonde hair. “Without trying, I mean. As soon as you see them, you’ll feel it. And then it just kind of never stops.”

“_ Ow _ ,” Opal complained, swatting Ronan’s hand away. “How can someone make you calm _ all _ the time? That’s not even true. You and Daddy still get stressed. You still argue sometimes.”

Ronan took a moment to mentally curse the real-world dynamic of soulmates; to wish it could be as easy as something out of a storybook—marks magically appearing on skin, or the world remaining devoid of color until the crossing of paths. Human emotions were too messy. Sure, he got it. But he’d known his soulmate for twenty-five years, give or take. He’d gotten it the second he first saw Adam, but not a moment sooner. If he were being honest, he’d thought it was all bullshit up until the exact moment he’d laid eyes on Adam’s lithe fingers gripping the handlebars of his worn-out bike. He wasn’t going to tell Opal that part, though.

It was a beautiful day at the Barns—the sun was shining, birds singing, cows grazing lazily among the fields, and Ronan figured it was as good a time as any to spend an afternoon recounting just enough of his past with Adam to their daughter to prompt her to swear off the idea of romance altogether. “Come on,” he said, pushing lazily off the porch and reveling in the feel of the soft grass beneath his feet. “Let’s take a walk.”

* * *

They didn’t settle until they’d made it a good three acres past the house, opting to take post at the small, makeshift dock at the edge of the largest pond and dangle their bare feet into the water. Opal didn’t even bother rolling up her jeans.

“You want to know how I knew?” Ronan asked, finally breaking what had been an amiable silence, save for the cicadas. 

Opal looked up at him.

“It was really distinct. The _ no butterflies _ rule always applies, but the whole thing plays out differently for different people, I guess.” Ronan kicked at a bluegill nibbling his toe, splashing water up the side of his calf. “For me, it was sociability. The very first time I ever saw your daddy, I wanted to talk to him. _ Needed _ to. I craved it like nothing else I’d ever experienced. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly an extrovert, so that would’ve been enough of a tell on its own. I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong, but I went to bed that night and had dreams about him. About what my brain thought his voice would sound like. What I’d say to him, if I had the chance. And on top of that, he was just—he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, but I didn’t feel an ounce of nerves. If I wasn’t good at talking to people I didn’t give a shit about, you should’ve seen me trying to impress someone. But I never had that problem _ once _with him. Everything was natural. Familiar.”

Opal bit her lip, clearly attempting to hide a fond grin, and finally removed her jacket, tilting her face back to the sun. “All they ever teach us in school is _ no butterflies _. But I don’t really get it. Does that mean anybody I’m not nervous around could be my soulmate?”

“It goes deeper than that,” Ronan elaborated with a shake of his head. “It’s called that, the _ no butterflies _ principle, because that’s the most surface explanation of the feeling. If you ever run into somebody you think you could be interested in and then you realize being around them makes you jittery, you’ll know that’s not it. But the sensation you get when you _ do _ meet them—” He paused, scrubbing a hand over his chin. “It’s less like _ meeting _ , and more like your entire being saying, _ Oh, yeah, there he is. _Or, you know, her, or they, or whoever. It’s like—it’s like coming back to a home you’ve been gone from so long you forgot it existed, and then you see it again and you can’t believe you ever left.”

Opal mulled this over for a long moment, studying a dragonfly that had landed on the cattail nearest her head, and countered, “Okay, but that still doesn’t explain what you meant by the whole _ you’ll always feel it _ thing.”

“Being soulmates doesn’t make your relationship perfect,” Ronan told her. “There’ll still be shit you don’t agree on. Life’s hard. As you get older, it gets harder. You’re gonna come across stuff you don’t know how to deal with, and maybe what you think is the best way isn’t what _ they _think is the best way. Everybody argues every once in a while. The difference is that, with your soulmate, you never question whether things are gonna work out okay. It’s not hard to remember that it’s you, together, against the world. Not you against each other. Life sucks sometimes. People die. Cars break down. Jobs don’t last forever. Finding your soulmate doesn’t mean you’ll be happy all the time. It just means you know you will be again.”

“What if…” Opal stopped, suddenly very interested in the shadowed outline of her feet beneath the water. “What if you met them when you were really young? Like, too young to realize you felt differently around them, but then, as you grew up, you realized it was kind of like that? Like it felt like you’d known them longer than you’d been alive, or like things were always just—just _ easy _ with them? Do you think that’s possible? That maybe you wouldn’t know because you’d just _ always _known?”

There was only one person she could be alluding to. Only one person she’d known her whole life and had never been separated from long enough to test the boundaries of such a bond. At sixteen, Opal was still plenty young enough not to have met her soulmate—but if she had. Well. Ronan couldn’t say the odds were improbable. “You think it’s Seph?” he asked.

“I hope it is,” Opal admitted after a long moment, so quiet the rippling of the wind over the pond nearly overpowered her. “If it’s not, I don’t—I don’t know what I’d do. I know I. I’m.”

_ In love with her. _Ronan didn’t need to hear the completed sentence aloud to understand its implications. He’d have felt precisely the same way about Adam, he knew, if on some otherworldly plane it hadn’t been him. “If it’s her, she’s thought about it, too,” Ronan said, knocking his shoulder against Opal’s. “You should talk to her.”

Opal swallowed. “But what if...what if she says she’s just never considered it? Does that mean it’s definitely _ not _ her?”

Ronan scoffed. “She’s Gansey’s kid. Trust me, she’s considered it with every person she’s ever come across in her life, down to the statistics.”

Before Opal had a chance to respond, the distant sound of a motor made itself known, and Ronan found upon casting his gaze back toward the house that Adam was pulling into the driveway. “Wanna race?”

Opal beamed. 

They reached Adam at the same time, each tagging one of his outstretched hands, both of which he caught and used as leverage to pull them against his sides. “Hi,” he greeted, kissing Ronan briefly on the lips and Opal on top of the head. “I stopped at the store on the way home. Burgers sound okay for dinner?”

“Sure, if you sit your ass down and let us cook ‘em,” Ronan challenged. 

“Um,” Opal started, ducking out from under Adam’s arm, “I’ll come back down and help you, Dad, but can I—can I go—”

“Go on,” Ronan allowed, with a playful shove to her shoulder. “Go call her. But make it quick, I’m starving.”

“I will,” Opal promised, pushing herself to her tiptoes between them to brush her lips over Ronan’s cheek and then Adam’s. “Fifteen minutes.” 

“What was that?” Adam asked, amused, as Opal disappeared into the house. 

“We’ve been talking about soulmates today,” Ronan informed him, twining their fingers together as they retraced the few steps back to the car to unload groceries. “She wanted to know how we knew for sure we were it for each other and what the feeling’s really like when you take it out of a textbook. Figured something was up, but I wasn’t gonna pry. Then she started asking if it was possible not to know you felt it because you’d been feeling it for so long.”

Adam raised his head from the inside of the car, holding out a handful of bags to Ronan. “Persephone?”

“She thinks so,” Ronan confirmed, accepting the bags from him. “Hopes so, at least. What do you think?”

Adam extracted the remainder of the groceries, bumping the door with his hip to close it. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, actually. So she’s going to call her now?”

“Gonna ask if she’s ever thought about it.” Ronan preceded Adam up the stairs, entering the house and holding the door open for him. 

“She’s Gansey’s kid,” Adam laughed, stepping inside and toeing off his shoes. “She’s thought about it.”

They carried the bags into the kitchen and flung them down haphazardly on every available surface, unpacking and placing groceries fluidly in their designated homes. 

“I was serious,” Ronan chastised when they’d finished, arms loosely encircling Adam’s waist now that they’d managed to gravitate toward the center of the room. “Go relax. Lay down, even if it’s just on the couch. We’ll handle dinner.”

“I have a desk job, Ro,” Adam reminded him, ghosting a kiss over his jaw. “I’m not wearing myself out every day anymore.”

“Then you’re making up for lost time,” Ronan countered, cupping his cheek and kissing him in earnest. “Go on.”

Adam rolled his eyes but didn’t press the issue any further, only stopping once he’d reached the kitchen doorway to ask, “Ronan?”

“Adam?”

“If it hadn’t been you, I never would’ve found my soulmate. And if I had, by accident, or, just—whatever.” Adam ran a hand through his dusty hair, tongue swiping over his bottom lip. “If I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I would’ve told fate to go fuck itself. I would always have picked you.”

Ronan felt the corner of his mouth tugging upward. “Is that what you think we should tell O, if things don’t turn out how she wants? Fuck fate?”

“Fuck fate,” Adam echoed with a nod of solidarity. “But it did deal us a pretty good hand.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, I’m not actually doing Pynch Week (I planned on it and then life happened and here we are) and I know this is a couple days late for that prompt anyway but I’ve been reading everyone else’s and this just happened and I felt like since it was done I should post it. 
> 
> The idea behind this comes partly from the only way I knew how to explain it when one of my best friends asked me how I knew what the difference was between my spouse and everyone else I’d ever been with and partly from the way Blue makes Gansey quiet. It’s a more abstract take and I know all the loose ends aren’t tied up, but I hope you guys enjoy it anyway!
> 
> (Title is from The End of All Things by P!atD.)


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